The duke 790 is pretty exciting. Would make a great back road bruiser & track day toy. Probably the basis for an interesting club racer too. Although I'm not sure where it would slot in with LRRS. Too big for light-weight??

The real drag is the suspenders:

Quote:

The suspension is handled by WP, with a 43mm fork at the front and monoshock at the rear. The fork is nonadjustable, while the rear is adjustable for spring preload.

Lame!

There will probably be an R version before long.. and only offered in Europe.

It's worth pointing out that the 790 Adventure is just a prototype, not a production model. Which sucks big donkey balls. They need a MW twin ADV'er like yesterday. I haven't spent enough time thinking about the 1090 ADV-R and that may actually fill the void. But on paper the 790 ADV was the bike I'd been waiting for.

I'm even more annoyed with Yamaha for not having a production T7/Tenere 7/whatever-they-want-to-call-it. They've been teasing a ADV'ed up FZ-07 for a while now and it's fucking due. Build that shit, yo!!

Also worthy of note is BMW refreshing the F700/800GSes. The 850GS now gets all (most?) of the electronic goodies available on the 1200GS without the weight. Of note to me is the electronic cruise. Seems they brought the F850GS on par with the Tiger 800 XCx models. Which is great. Claimed curb weight is just over 500 lbs.. which actually isn't that bad. I saw a nicely turned out F800GS with some 80/20 tires on it ridden very aggressively off-pavement at an event a couple years ago and it changed my opinion of it a little. That machine had an aftermarket pipe on it and sounded a lot more exciting. Got me thinking the platform might not be as boring as it seemed.

Unfortunately I am sure BMW will still want all the money for it. And all local dealers will only order the bike with every $option$ $box$ ticked. Shame.

Not really feelin' the Husky. Can't get past those protrusions on the tank... this keeps on popping into my head:

Gotta say, though, that I'm liking the overall direction many of the manufacturers are taking with naked bikes. Every year they seem to do a bit better at capturing the vibe of old bikes without doing straight ripoffs.

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Kwicherbichen. I'm old and I'm slow and I don't care. Get off my lawn, ya punk.